Queen costs £4million more than she said: Philip's pay wasn't included

Thursday 14 July 2011 09:14 BST

Public purse: MPs were today debating a new way of paying the Queen and Philip

The amount of taxpayers' cash paid to the Queen is £4 million higher than thought, new figures from the House of Commons reveal today.

Buckingham Palace last week said the cost to the public purse of the monarchy was £32.1 million in 2010/11. But new research by the Commons library calculates the true cost of public money required to meet the Queen's public duties was in fact £36.2 million.

The difference emerges because the palace calculated its figures under the rules of the new Sovereign Grant, which the Queen will receive from next year, and ignored several direct grants from Parliament.

Amounts excluded by the Palace included the £359,000 a year paid by the Government to Prince Philip, and other direct grants of £3.8 million for State visits, ceremonial occasions, honours, equerries, and the maintenance of the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh and Home Park at Windsor. Graham Smith, spokesman for anti-monarchy campaigners Republic, said: "It does highlight the fact that the Palace was trying to pull the wool over people's eyes last week.

"The Commons figure is more accurate in the sense it includes certain expenditure but neither of them include things like security or lost revenue from the Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of Cornwall."

The figures were collated by the Commons library to help MPs as they today debate the Sovereign Grant Bill, which will consolidate the Civil List and government grants for travel, communications and buildings into a single payment to the Queen based on the annual profits of the Crown Estate.

Republic, which calculates the true cost of the monarchy to be £202 million a year, said the Sovereign Grant was a "gold-plated deal" as it can never decrease.

A London MP wants to block the Sovereign Grant Bill until the Queen's cleaners earn the capital's "living wage" of £8.30 an hour. The cleaners at Buckingham Palace, St James's Palace and Clarence House earn £6.45 an hour - 52p an hour more than the £5.93 national minimum wage, says Labour's John McDonnell. The MP said: "I'm trying to make sure the money that is made available from taxpayers to pay for the royal palaces is also used to pay the Queen's cleaners a decent living wage in London." The cleaners work for two contractors.